Is “Trumpism” even a thing?
Today’s GOP and much of rightwing media is a vast Rube Goldberg (no relation) machine powered by a hyperactive hamster with improbable fur, spinning a wheel as it runs after its own reflection in a mirror. That hamster is Donald Trump’s id.
If Trumpism were an ideology, there would be a consistency to the Trump presidency that could be explained by a coherent ideological program. On a few issues, like trade and immigration, that’s possible. But even these ideological commitments have little explanatory or predictive power when compared to what comes with understanding Trump’s irritable mental gestures, intellectual laziness, cavernous appetite for attention and praise, and the manifest incompetence they all produce.
Jonah Goldberg, Burn, Baby, Burn (possible paywall).